About the lyrics of David Bowie songs!
Following up on yesterday’s post about Meta’s use of “Five Years” in a (possibly) unintentionally chilling ad about AI and the future, I thought I’d rank Bowie’s top 10 songs about the apocalypse… 1. “Five Years” (1972) Yeah, had to…
Tomorrow, I'll be joined by James Briggs, author of From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads: A Bowie Odyssey. As an avid cyclist myself, I'm extraordinarily impressed by James' bike trip across Europe in search of the meaning of the lyrics…
I have often written about certain words Bowie used in lyrics again and again, notably “star” and “nothing.” But Bowie would also go back to the well to use certain phrases. This is not a comprehensive list and does not…
A few weeks ago I did a fun post of obscure references in Bowie songs. The well is very deep— there are a lot of obscure references in Bowie songs, so here is a part 2: 1. “The same old…
I have long thought that the common idea that Bowie is especially associated with space is exaggerated. The man recorded more than 400 songs, only a fraction of which have anything to do with space. Right? So, I started to…
I have been writing a series of posts inspired by reading Daniel Rachel’s excellent book, This Ain’t Rock ‘N’ Roll: Pop Music, The Swastika and the Third Reich, and then interviewing Rachel. This is the third and probably final installment…
It is tempting to try to speculate as to what David Bowie meant by his lyrics. Despite writing about Bowie on a daily basis, I don’t pretend to understand what he was actually thinking. Surely there is overlap between the…
David Bowie is not the central figure in Daniel Rachel’s excellent book, This Ain’t Rock ‘N’ Roll: Pop Music, The Swastika and the Third Reich, but he is prominent within its pages. A Bowie lyric, from “Future Legend,” the preamble…
What prompted this list was the observation that Bowie sometimes borrowed from one song for use in another. I was thinking about this as it pertained to Bowie borrowing from one of his own earlier songs and repurposing it later…
The truth is that when I don’t have time to write a proper post (these take time and thought), I can usually bang out a list, which tend to be popular anyway. And they almost write themselves. That’s what this…